What we intend to do in this short essay is to consider part of the epistolary of Rebora as a literary object, an object that follows the condition of poetry hand in hand (at least in certain moments) and that often goes beyond it precisely at the level of daring formal and semantic. In evaluating the epistolary under the literary aspect, in its creativity so similar to writing in verse, our pourpose is to demonstrate how at the basis of Rebora’s expressiveness (or expressionism) there is a powerful endogenous drive, and that his disorder is psychological rather than cultural, or “stylistic”.

Stefan Grabiński, a famous Polish author of weird fiction, who is known especially for his collection of short stories Demon ruchu (The Motion Demon, 1919), lived and worked in a period marked by a new artistic style – expressionism. Although Grabiński came from Lviv, often regarded as a province in Poland after the Great War, he could have a contact with the latest ideas concerning art and philosophy. Indeed, both in his short stories and in his novels may be found some traits typical for the expressionist poetics as, for example, a subjective perspective, a color sensitivity or a tendency to violent and dynamic use of formal elements. Grabiński was fascinated by a German literature – he read Gustav Meyrink, E.T.A. Hoffmann and an expressionist magazine “Der Orchideengarten”. Moreover, he liked going to the cinema where he could watch, for example, a famous German expressionist film – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The only text by Grabiński which was adapted into film in his life was a short story Kochanka Szamoty (Szamota’s Mistress, 1922). Although this seemed to be a great material for an expressionist film, the director – Leon Trystan – decided to realize it in an impressionist poetics.

This article argues that the short story ‘Ave Patria, morituri te salutant’, first published in a book of Stanisław Reymont's short stories in 1907, shows an overwhelming influence of the expressionist aesthetic. It is conspicuously present in the story's stripped-down sentences, spiked with highly emotive (animal) imagery, and cast in lines that move inexorably towards the catastrophic end. It manifests itself in the disillusioned, sarcastic tone which the writer uses to take up old certainties like military glory and patriotism. Finally, it brings to the fore the conflict between man and nature, man and the universe, the individual and the crowd. As all of those elements are evidently part of the narrative and dramatic structure of ‘Ave Patria…’, it should be viewed as an exemplification of Reymont's drift from realism to modernism (preexpressionism). That transition is also signalized by the tripartite structure of the story. The divisions are worked out with the precision of a master craftsman assembling ‘an epic clock’ (to borrow a telling phrase from Kazimierz Wyka's analysis of the structure of The Peasants), or a painter designing a triptych. The article pursues the latter analogy further by discussing the impressionist technique of framing and cutting off the dispensable elements of the picture.

This study is an exploration of formal-aesthetic correspondences between presenta-tion strategies and techniques of transforming traditional literary and musical genre conventions in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. It takes as its bottom line William J. Entwistle’s distinction between re-creation and recreation (he used it in his appreciation of Don Quixote and so did Erich Auerbach) and his under-standing of art as an act of reproduction (re-creation) obliged to please (recreation). Seen from that perspective, both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Berg’s opera “suffer” from ex-cess – overmuchness and surfeit with a tangible residue of melancholy. But it is because of these surpluses that these two works are regarded as masterpieces with continuing universal appeal.